Thursday, June 30, 2011

Teens With Cancer

A student at my school was diagnosed with cancer last year. He has just started a blog and wrote to me a few weeks ago to ask if I could give him advice on how to get more readers. I suggested that one of the ways would be for me to share a link to his blog with my learning network. 
With his permission, I encourage you to check out Jacob's Teens With Cancer blog. Please share the link with others (especially any kids you might know with cancer) and leave him a comment. I know he would appreciate it.


Here is the advice I gave him about publicizing his blog.
1. First, if it is ok with you, I will share your blog on Twitter and on my blog. But please let me know. I want to make sure it is ok with you before I start sharing your blog URL.

2. Take the ads off your blog and don't push too many products. You want to make sure people take you seriously (especially when you are trying to build a following) and if you have too many ads or if you start promoting products people may get suspicious about your motives.

3. Find other bloggers who are writing about cancer, even if they aren't teenagers and start a blogroll on your blog with links back to their blogs. If you link to other bloggers and comment on their blogs or write about their posts that is the best way to get them to reciprocate and start adding you to their blogrolls which is a way to build a following from their readers. Alltop,Google Blog search, and Technorati are all good blog search engines.

4. Start a Twitter account and search Twitter for people writing about Cancer. Twitter is probably one of the best blog promotion tools you can use. There are a few ways to find similar people to follow on Twitter. Search Twitter for key words that relate to you and then follow the people that use that keyword.  Wefollow and Twellow are two good Twitter search engines. When you create your Twitter account make sure you don't protect your updates and you include information about your cancer in your bio.

5. Set up a Google Analytics or a Statcounter account to see who is reading your blog and who is linking to your blog.